There’s an auto shop in East Long Beach that’s been switching out brakes and tuning up suspension systems since the same year a pilot completed the first around-the-world flight.
For 101 years, East Long Beach Brake Service has been operating near the northwest corner of Recreation Park, but until recently, its future was uncertain.
Steve Wright, who had been running the shop since his father Bob Wright retired in 2022, had been trying to sell off the business for over a year and a half with no success when he crossed paths with Kevin Kemp, who was working a corporate job while trying to find a place to launch his own paintless dent repair business.
The meeting sent Kemp’s life on an unexpected detour. Rather than see the East Long Beach Brake Service and its hundred years of history close entirely, he offered to buy both the garage and the business.
“I’m a romantic, like that story means something to me,” Kemp said. “100 years is just really special.”
With help from the crew of mechanics, Kemp is now trying to live up to the shop’s 100-year reputation.
A Long Beach staple
The exact location of the first East Long Beach Brakes is murky, but from 1952 until 2017, it sat on the corner of Anaheim Street and Ximeno Avenue near the city-owned Recreation Park golf course.
About eight years ago, it made the trek one street over to Anaheim and Prospect Avenue.
Francisco Perez, the shop’s lead mechanic, has been repairing brakes at the business since 1992.
He got the job after a neighbor in Garden Grove saw a young Perez always working on cars and suggested he walk into East Long Beach Brake Service and ask for a job, Perez said.
Perez was hired on the spot.
Veteran mechanics immediately started showing him the ropes, including “tricks to do it faster and easier,” Perez said.
The shop still uses jacks rather than lifts to suspend the cars while working on them.
On slow days in the shop, Bob and Steve Wright encouraged Perez to bring in his 1964 Buick Skylark and work on it, Perez said.
“They would treat me like family, always,” Perez said.
A neighborly tradition
Kemp said his aunt, uncle and cousin had been “bringing their cars here forever,” he said. “This was just a special place that they really trusted.”
During a conversation with Steve Wright, Kemp learned that the shop had sometimes cut customers a deal if they couldn’t afford to pay for a full brake repair, Kemp said.
Part of the reason he bought the shop was to continue that neighborly way of doing business, Kemp said.
Although it’s not great business practice, Kemp encourages customers on tighter budgets to put off repairing their brakes until they get the full use out of them.
Kemp said he and the other mechanics make a habit of turning away customers who come requesting repairs that their car dealership falsely told them were necessary.
“Trust me, it sucks because you’re not making money, but I’m not going to put brakes on a car that doesn’t need brakes,” Kemp said.
Local roots
Kemp, originally from Torrance, moved to Long Beach after his wife, Christy, made it clear she was a lifelong Long Beach resident and didn’t plan to change that anytime soon, he said.
“Once I moved here, it just felt like home,” Kemp said. “It was the first place that I felt like a true sense of community.”
Kemp left a corporate role at Whole Foods to buy East Long Beach Brakes.
The switch was jarring at first, but Kemp said this line of work suits him much better.
Dating back to his teenage years, Kemp and his dad had bonded over a love for cars. Kemp said he has owned over 200 cars in his life, including a Ford Taunus Transit that won a “special interest” award last April at the Seal Beach car show.
Two years before buying East Long Beach Brake Service, he had started a paintless dent repair business after an apprenticeship with Jeff Magill, “The Godfather” of paintless dent removal in Southern California, according to Kemp.
He credited his wife for her support and trust throughout the process.
“She’s the reason why I’m here today,” Kemp said. “She’s had a lot of faith in these decisions and sort of crazy changes that I’ve made, and they all just continue to work out.”